MAVIDH Score: A COVID-19 Severity Scoring using Chest X-Ray Pathology Features

The application of computer vision for COVID-19 diagnosis is complex and challenging, given the risks associated with patient misclassifications. Arguably, the primary value of medical imaging for COVID-19 lies rather on patient prognosis. Radiological images can guide physicians assessing the severity of the disease, and a series of images from the same patient at different stages can help to gauge disease progression. Hence, a simple method based on lung-pathology interpretable features for scoring disease severity from Chest X-rays is proposed here. As the primary contribution, this method correlates well to patient severity in different stages of disease progression with competitive results compared to other existing, more complex methods. An original data selection approach is also proposed, allowing the simple model to learn the severity-related features. It is hypothesized that the resulting competitive performance presented here is related to the method being feature-based rather than reliant on lung involvement or opacity as others in the literature. A second contribution comes from the validation of the results, conceptualized as the scoring of patients groups from different stages of the disease. Besides performing such validation on an independent data set, the results were also compared with other proposed scoring methods in the literature. The results show that there is a significant correlation between the scoring system (MAVIDH) and patient outcome, which could potentially help physicians rating and following disease progression in COVID-19 patients.